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I got a beta code from a friend, but get an "unknown error" when I try to use it. Can anyone shed light on this?

On 11/25/12 I GMed the Mythic Adventures Playtest scenario "The Wrath of Nature".

There were 3 players present. We used the existing 7th level builds of the iconic characters Valeros (fighter), Ezren (wizard) and Kyra (cleric). I felt the 7th level builds were appropriate due to the fact that we were running with 3 PCs rather than 4, and the character sheets were readily available and didn't need to be modified for play (beyond adding the 3 mythic tiers).

The players were all experienced and generally made well-considered decisions while refraining from using out-of-character knowledge and/or metagaming.

I ran the monsters in a manner appropriate to their intelligence. The only change I made to the adventure as written was to substitute a Fire Goddess's Blade for the Bow of Erastil after the second encounter. The gp values aren't equal but the swap had a negligible effect on the adventure.

To sum up my experience:
* I think the players enjoyed using the mythic powers, but Amazing Initiative is just too obvious of a choice. I don't know that it's irredeemably broken, but it needs to be brought in line with the other uses of mythic power. Perhaps as an extra standard action that stacks with Haste, etc.
* I like dual initiative as a monster ability, but it would be unfair to make it a monster-only ability.
* Consideration should be given to making the use of mythic power a once-per-round ability.

I'll let the players speak for themselves here, but I think the Mythic Adventures path abilities are generally good, but there are some very obvious choices, which to my mind means an imbalance. No one used mythic power to add a d6. Similarly, the mythic spells have some clear winners. Mythic CLW compared to Mythic Bless? No brainer. Anyway, that's it for now.

Zo

I've read through the playtest document and I like what I see. Sure there are some obvious picks and no-picks as far as mythic abilities and feats and so on, but I reckon that'll get ironed out. Mostly.

What I'm concerned with, and will bear in mind as I playtest, is that it appears to require a crap-ton more bookkeeping, both on the players' behalf and the DM's. Everyone has a ki pool now. Feats need to be cross-referenced between mythic and vanilla and the new prereq of mythic tiers has entered the picture.

If that doesn't faze the average player, then they have to reckon with the lesser trials. Much of the wording appears to require the DM to keep track of the success of the trials, especially the "do X to a creature with full hit points" trials. How should this be handled? Does it not break immersion when, after a fight, the fighter raises his hand and asks "so, was that ogre at full hit points, or..?"

I'm not complaining, nor have I tested it in-game. It's just a thought I've had, and I could be totally off base.

I haven't tested anything in-game, but on first glance there is an imbalance among the flaws.

For example, compare
Insanity (confused for d4 rounds after being critted or failing save against mind-affecting spells)
to
Material Weakness: Silver (crits auto-confirmed and multiplier increased by one, plus no DR when hit by weapons primarily made from silver)

I like the idea of flaws. There may need to be some rebalancing, if only to stop the min/maxers with Dependency: Urine.

This may have been dealt with in an older thread, but assuming a low-level caster has successfully identified a magic item (say a +1 sword in this case), would the item count as a "common item" for purposes of Appraise? At what level of power would magic items stop counting as common and warrant a higher Appraise DC?

Just...what? Buh.

Just got the email and locked mine in. Vampire - Sophie + Demons + Paizo Red Dragon. March can't come quick enough! I'm honing my painting skills in the meantime. What have the rest of you gone for?

We lost one of our group last week; Nigel Jones passed away. Details are still a bit fuzzy, he had been in for brain surgery two weeks before. Never said a whole lot, but he was at every session and rolled his dice with the best of 'em. Just thought I'd get it out there.

Zo

Here's a simple flowchart I made for Kingmaker kingdom building. If there're any problems or errors, let me know.

Zo

As a relative late-comer to the transition of WOTC and Paizo taking the rudder of the legacy of 3/3.5e it's really interesting to me to hear people's views on the value of leftover 3.5 edition material, and I've got a question I'd like to pose.

Given that many people feel that much of the 3.5 material is either overpowered or only vaguely backward compatible, how likely is it that we'll see a rehabilitation of that material from the fan base?

Zo

Having recently moved to New Zealand, I found myself having to re-buy a lot of the things we left behind in Thailand, an inkjet printer among them. I picked up an Epson TX110 on sale and have installed a CISS system (ink reservoir) to avoid paying ridiculous sums for printer ink. It's not without its drawbacks, but I figure I've saved a couple hundred $NZ over the past few months. I print a lot of worksheets and so on for my ESL students, and I've been printing out chapters and sections of various RPG resources as well.

The TX110 is a typical "razor & blades" inkjet/scanner, sold cheaply to push ink on the consumer. Print quality is *meh* but it's done its job. Getting it to work with the CISS has been a little frustrating, and I leave the scanner bed in the up position to allow the ink tubes to move freely.

I figure this community uses a lot of ink/toner in pursuit of our hobby, so I wonder what printer(s) you use. Any gems out there? Any models to avoid? Does anyone else use a CISS?

Zo

I received my order this morning and found that one of the Chessex dice boxes had been broken in transit and the jagged plastic shards had gouged the books I'd ordered, mostly on and near the spine. The damage is mostly cosmetic but somewhat dismaying. I was pleased with the speed of the delivery (I live in Auckland, NZ) but can't help wondering if more effective methods of preventing damage might be used when shipping around the world.

Zo

A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. She combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. She tells the truth, keeps her word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished.

Lawful good combines honor with compassion.

Lawful good is often regarded as the most restrictive of alignments. I'd like to discuss the extents of a system of in-game ethics that might be regarded as both lawful and good, from the tropic extreme of "lawful stupid" to the most liberal of interpretations.

I usually DM, but I've started playing Kingmaker (first in-game sesh this weekend) with an all-dwarven party. I'm playing a lawful good Inquisitor of Abadar with a 6 Cha. We rolled stats, and I don't usually dump, but that's how it turned out. My character concept is an itinerant Andoran freedom fighter that moves from village to village agitating and organizing for Common Rule. Basically, Che Guevara minus the eloquence. My particular interest is how to portray such an abysmally low social IQ while doing "the right thing". The hackneyed holier-than-thou route is a well-worn cliche; how can I add individuality to my character without revisiting the "gee shucks"/dwarf/lawful good beat-cop schtick?

Zo

Ok, this is a super-noob problem, but I'm posting to make sure I haven't missed anything. Couldn't find anything by searching, but if someone remembers a thread, please point me to it.

Assume a level 1 universalist wizard with Int 16 and a rank in Spellcraft, giving a total Spellcraft of +7 (+3 Int, +1 rank, +3 class skill). This character can auto-learn any spell he/she can cast by taking 10, since the base DC is 15+spell level and the skill check will result in a 17.

Furthermore, by dropping a skill point in Spellcraft at every other level--which is something a wizard with 5 or 6 skill points per level would certainly do, at minimum--this character will ALWAYS be able to auto-learn any spell of appropriate level or lower, given that they use their 4th, 8th, and so on attribute bumps to increase Int (so as to be able to cast spells of [Int-10] level)

The only hiccups, assuming I've understood correctly that you can take 10 to learn spells, concern specialist wizards learning opposition spells, and even this is mitigated if the wizard in question isn't the pointedly mediocre specimen I've used as my previous example. Am I off-base? Because it seems to me that auto-learning all your spells kind of defeats part of the (fun) challenge of playing a wizard.

Zo

I blather a lot on this board about DMing, so I'd like to pose a couple of questions to "full-time" DMs:

How thorough are you when it comes to record keeping, adventure writing, developing your campaigns, and so on?

How much do you "wing it" during a session, and do you take that into account when writing adventures (or taking notes on published APs)?

For those of you(us) with homebrew or semi-homebrew campaigns, how much behind-the-scenes plot development do you prepare prior to its introduction to the PCs?

Zo

My group is looking for new players for our homebrew Forgotten Realms PFRPG game. We play at the University of Auckland.

Zo